New Year ART REVIEW of The Apartment by Chris Bonno

New Year ART REVIEW of The Apartment by Chris Bonno

It was hard choosing a highlight for Chris Bonno because we love all of his work. We chose “The Apartment” because of Jack Lemmon’s expression of love for Shirley Maclaine

Photo by: Cat Gwynn

Art collector Bill Prady contacted me a over year ago or so and said he’d been wanting to get a “Bonno” painting for awhile and he had an idea. He wanted a moment from the final sequence of the Apartment where (spoiler alert) Jack Lemmon’s character finally expresses his love for Shirley MacClaine’s character and the only way we know how she feels about him, is by her facial expression as well as how she takes the cards from him.

I searched the movie to isolate that moment, gave Bill some variations of that moment, to choose from and he made his choice after we discussed it, to make sure that it had all of the elements we where looking for. Then he suggested colorizing the props and furniture subtly, while keeping the actors and the background, black and white. He had also specified an approach (style) of painting he had seen me do before which he requested. We went with a canvas size and shape that supported the idea that this was a film moment and then I went to work. So in essence he had the idea, produced and art-directed this piece. A romantic comedy painting from a classic. It’s acrylic on canvas 24″ x 36″ and now is over a mantle in his home.

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